4 - Sunday, May 30, 1993 - North Shore News Father and Son: A NEW National Film Board movie, Father and Son, by West Coast film-maker Colin Browne, is a highly personal documentary about an ex-navy man who remained an im- penetrable mystery to his offspring despite all the years they spent together, loving (he same dog, as Browne puts it, and revealing ‘as little to each other as possible.’ The fick naturally triggered a flood of emotions about my own late futher, which, of course, is what it was supposed to do. I suspect that this kind of autobiographical documentary is one of the media waves of the future, now that cameras have been around long cnough for en- tire lifetimes io be recorded. Just in my own family, | have stockpiled something like 70 hours of videotape, inchiding dubbed film footage going back to the 1950s. Colin Browne's film is abort how, even when they are physi- cally present, fathers can be emo- Honally absent. Not a new insight, but an interesting one, especially to me, a chronic psychological outsider who has always been curious about ‘normal’’ father- son relationships, After all, we are talking about a mysterious and profound run- ning-together of the genes, which some say never really separate. While | have been lucky enough to experience the role of father twice in my life, I have had only the briefest taste of the opposite experience: being the son. Unlike film-maker Browne, ! got to spend almost no time at all with my father, and 1 have assumed al} my adult life that whatever kind of a personality 1 may have, I have been shaped as much by this experience — lack of a father -- as by any other single factor. First of all, he was in the RCAF during the war, so all my brother and I knew of him was the sepia-colored framed photograph of ‘‘Daddy’’ in his uniform which our mother made us kiss before Bow Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL bed every night, and then we'd say prayers for him. After the war, be was home briefly, but was drinking hard by then, breaking down doors and that sort of thing, He got a job driving a truck all over the Prairies, and then ran off with another woman. Since he was skipping out on al- imony payments, there was little opportunity for get-togethers, ex- cept, memorably, the time he tried to kidnap my brother and me and take us from Winnipeg to the Calgary Stampede. The Mounties caught up with him somewhere in Saskatchewan, and took us two boys home to Mom. There was one summer | remember, although I don’t know the year. It must have been around 1947 or °48, maybe as late as ’49, He took me out on the road with him for a week or two. Camp Horizon 1993 international Summer Camp A Cultural/Recreational Program for Canadian and Japanese Young People Your child can be part of this unique summer camp at Cheakamus, near Squamish. Activities include language, culture, hiking, horseback riding, _ Canocing, camping out skills, and arts and crafts. Camp A: July 26 to 31 Camp B: August 2 to 7 For brochure and registration e OF course it stretches out in my mind now like an entire summer of driving a huge cruck wong mud ronds between endless fields of corn amd wheat and sunflowers, He worked the clutch and the brake and the gas pedal with his feet, sitting with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, while [sat on his lap and steered. Even on that one trip, he was already cheating on my mother, and made me promise not to men- tion the “aunt! who stayed over- night in the hotel with us in some small town in the middle of nowhere, Of course ny mother had no trouble prying the truth out of me later, leaving me in the horrible position of having ratted on my dad, with the collapse of the mar- riage therefore being “my fault. } mention this in order to con- cede a point: I’m one of those people who really have a problem with authority. | automatically re- sent it, in any form, The most trying stage of my life, psychologically, was when | briefly acquired some authority, and immediately found myself rebclling against ... me. Over the years when [was ex- perimenting with marathon T- groups, Gestalt therapy and hyp- notic dream regression, trying to HONEST HARD WORK g BARBARA DAHL gf PuT “BARBIE DOLL” TO WORK FOR YOU 983-2518 BS REAAIK" ist NARROWS f the shadow of the get to the root of certain self- destructive impulses, | gradually came to understand that [had basically felt so betrayed by ay father J couldn't trust any older men, and almost all authority fig- ures, of course, were older men. Even today, when I find many authority figures to be younger than me, with more and more of them tending to be women, the feeling of antipathy lingers. This is basically a healthy at- titude for a journalist, and no doubt partially explains the choice of writing as the right field of ac- tivity, as opposed to, say, being a cop or a teacher or a manager or a producer. All of which is simply to say that the experience of not having a father around is bound to affect the development of your versonal- ity. in my case, it has meant not having a model of fatherly behavior around to either emulate or defy, What I did not realize, until viewing Colin Browne's fiim, is just how stressful it would be hav- ing a father around physically who wasn't really there emotional- ly. ail At feast, in my situation, there was no jerking around of my little psyche by my old mun past i cer- tain point. fle was only around briefly, caused no end of havoc, and then mercifully took off. For several years § felt sorry for myself, of course. But by the time I was a teenager | was beginning to be thankful that [didn’t have a father around to have to deal with. } could just get on with what I wanted to do in life, which, by that time, was to write, Fram Colin Browne’s film, ( get the distinct impression that old- style fathers, which my father would surely have been had he been around, were mostly an un- communicative, no-contact, emo- tionally walled-off lot. And Browne’s message, if there is one, is that if you're going to be a father nowadays, do it with all thy might. Because, far sooner than you think, the son’! be all grown up and gone, and you'll have missed ' the chance to get to know him. lvl probably never come again. When You Fiave A Small Screw Loose. Keep a sharp eye on things with regular maintenance and repairs. S Douglas Optical Dispensary Ltd. 1685 Marine Drive in West Vancouver 925-2! 10 Thank you to all the people who took the time recently to return a questionnaire to my office. 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